Mexico City's gay marriage law still igniting debate
A Catholic cardinal accuses the nation's Supreme Court, which this month reaffirmed the law, of being on the take.
August 18, 2010|By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
 Reporting from Mexico City — Gays in Mexico's capital today can marry and adopt children, broad rights that go beyond anything offered in much of the world and enshrined now by a remarkable series of rulings by the nation's Supreme Court.
But reaching this point has left casualties along the way.
For President Felipe Calderon and his conservative National Action Party, the decision to challenge Mexico City's same-sex marriage law backfired. Not only did the 11-member court reaffirm the law, but the wording of its rulings could make it more difficult for states to mount challenges.
And the debate ignited an ugly spat with the Roman Catholic Church, with one of the country's top prelates accusing the court of being on the take.
As gay marriage languishes in California, the state's law in limbo, the Mexican Supreme Court voted overwhelmingly this month to uphold the capital's same-sex marriage statute as constitutional; to require such unions to be recognized across the nation; and to permit gay and lesbian couples to adopt children.
The court hewed to Mexico's strict separation of church and state and said the constitution did not indicate that marriage had to be defined as the union of a man and woman. To deny gay couples the right to adopt, the court said, would amount to discrimination.
"There is nothing that indicates that homosexual couples are less apt parents than heterosexual ones," Justice Arturo Zaldivar said in televised proceedings this week.
The adoption provision was upheld 9 to 2 in a vote Monday, as proponents erupted in cheers of "Marriage and adoption! For all the nation!"
The law was first approved by Mexico City's left-dominated government in December — the most far-reaching such legislation in Latin America at the time — and the first marriages took place in March. Mexico City is a federal district like Washington, D.C., and acts as a state.
Immediately Calderon instructed his attorney general to take the law to court, arguing that it posed a threat to traditional families and the procreation of children. Yet even justices appointed by Calderon's PAN party voted to overrule the president.
"This has been an important demonstration of the judicial and political independence of the court," said John Mill Ackerman, a legal expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and editor of the Mexican Law Review.
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